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Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment are back, with Transport Fever 2 now officially available with same-day support for Linux.

With a wide variety of transportation options available to build across multiple generations, there's a huge amount of content included. Prepare to kiss your time and friendships goodbye as we've got another great time-sink on our hands.

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Transport Fever 2 is a stylish transportation tycoon sim that gives you quite a lot of freedom to let your creative side flow. This is especially true thanks to the massively improved terrain shaping tools available to you, with the coastline and water no longer being a hard immovable border. You can now shape the terrain through the water, to completely change the shape or remove it all entirely.

Lots of other smaller touches made me appreciate Transport Fever 2 a lot more than the first game. For example, in the Free Play mode you now get a mini-map of what your random map generation will look like, with the ability to tweak more until you're happy.

They had a good foundation with Transport Fever and this second version builds upon it in a way that doesn't drastically change the experience but does make it feel a lot more worthwhile. It also looks awesome when you progress through it thanks to the improved graphics too. I just wish they did something with map borders, as they're just a hard edge.

Sadly, the one big thing I was worried about simply hasn't been solved for the second game. The performance while you're placing tracks and buildings is not good, with my i7-5960X/2080Ti dropping down noticeably hard. This is not a Linux issue though, even on Windows 10 it suffers the same exact problems.

Whatever calculations the game is doing when building, it eats away at it. Turning off the forced VSync can certainly help smoothen it out a little, but they chose to hide this setting so you can only do it in the configuration file found in your root Steam folder like:

~/.steam/root/userdata/*steamid*/1066780/local/settings.lua

In the settings.lua file, change vsync to "false" and you should have a better time with it but the developer really needs to work on that performance. Thankfully, it's only an issue when building.

Feature Highlight:

  • Experience the greatest logistical challenges from 1850 to today across three unique story campaigns featuring voiceovers and cutscenes.
  • Let your creativity run wild through giant sandbox maps in free play mode.
  • Choose from over 200 realistically modeled vehicles from Europe, America and Asia, including trains, buses, streetcars, trucks, aircraft and ships, plus modular stations, airports and harbors.
  • Track and manage your booming empire’s rise with intuitive construction tools and dynamic economy, transportation and city simulation systems.
  • Choose from a diverse array of natural ecosystems, all rendered in exquisite detail.
  • Create and share your own worlds, missions, landscapes, vehicles and more with the in-game map
    editor and extensive modding tools via Steam Workshop.

I find that Transport Fever 2 is made for people who just love to build, then sit back and watch all the moving parts. That's what I end up doing anyway, zooming the camera around to just take it all in. Well, that and people with a keen mind for finances because you have to keep your business going. You start small, gradually expand as you ferry various supplies around and hopefully stay out of the red. As a sequel, it does the job nicely.

They're offering a 10% discount until January 3rd. If you own the previous game, you also get an additional discount towards Transport Fever 2 to boost it up to 25% off. That's quite a big discount for a brand new game. Available on Humble Store, GOG and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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11 comments
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peta77 Dec 12, 2019
Finally! :D
Had pre-ordered it due to their previous Linux support and even having a Linux version in the beta version and luckily wasn't disappointed with it.
Runs good most of the time but I also noticed some drops in frame rate at situations you wouldn't expect. So some more optimizations would be nice. Also noticed it uses lots of VRAM (at 4K and set to highest quality nvidia-smi reported a usage of 6.5GB of video memory!); on largest map size though. But when having enough memory it runs good, interaction is very smooth.
Just have to figure out to what place they've moved some features / information. But so far (after about 4 hours of playing) it looks like a good evolution for the series. No giant step ahead but a reasonable improvement which made it worth the money.


Last edited by peta77 on 12 December 2019 at 1:17 am UTC
beko Dec 12, 2019
Build in pause mode seems to help a lot because in that case FPS drops don't matter much.
…and that AA is really killing FPS for me. Without I manage to keep my ~60 (vsync). Still fiddling with my config. Somewhat sorry that they didn't manage Vulkan :(

Gameplay wise it's nice. Played flawless for >6h now. They really polished track construction and once you get used to the new UI (and hotkeys) it's really smooth. Modular stations are fun. That dreaded "track is blocked" is gone. Can now build even with trains on the track. That is really awesome since it drove me up the walls with TF1 _a lot_. Also a clear indicator where some collision is.

Hope some missing features like auto-replace will be (re-)added soon.

Price is a sour spot. I understand that this is a niche game.
14 Dec 12, 2019
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Quoting: peta77Also noticed it uses lots of VRAM (at 4K and set to highest quality nvidia-smi reported a usage of 6.5GB of video memory!); on largest map size though. But when having enough memory it runs good, interaction is very smooth.
Unused memory is wasted money! :D
skinnyraf Dec 12, 2019
As far as I remember, the only game I have ever pre-ordered. I haven't played much yet (2 hrs?), but I like what I saw so far.
peta77 Dec 12, 2019
Quoting: 14
Quoting: peta77Also noticed it uses lots of VRAM (at 4K and set to highest quality nvidia-smi reported a usage of 6.5GB of video memory!); on largest map size though. But when having enough memory it runs good, interaction is very smooth.
Unused memory is wasted money! :D
Excess resource usage wastes a lot more money in the long run. I don't want to say they did a bad job, I don't know the code. But for people who don't have most current high end hardware that might be problematic if all of it is needed or the usage is not adaptive regarding available hardware resources and current game situation. Already had that in the first version where long running free games where you have lots of infrastructure built would slow down (in some situations very significantly), but can't tell right now about v2 as that requires lots of play time. But anyway, I like it that you can build up those giant structures, so I'm very happy they've increased the maximum map size.
Eike Dec 13, 2019
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Quoting: peta77
Quoting: 14Unused memory is wasted money! :D
Excess resource usage wastes a lot more money in the long run. I don't want to say they did a bad job, I don't know the code. But for people who don't have most current high end hardware that might be problematic if all of it is needed or the usage is not adaptive regarding available hardware resources and current game situation.

I'm not sure you've got an actual disagreement here. :)

If a game with ok graphics needs say 6 GB VRAM to run well, that's bad. It's not making good use of the resources.

If a game with ok graphics runs fine with 1.5 GB VRAM, but can make additional use of 6 GB, that's good. It's using the resources available.

There's different kind of resources. Coal e.g. is gone when used, so you should use the minimum needed. Workers on the opposite (*), you should make good use of those you've got. When you've got four and hire four more, you wouldn't want these to just sit around. RAM is like workers. That's what user 14 is saying with "Unused memory is wasted money!"

(*) Sorry for calling people "resources" here, it's for the sake of the argument.
Ehvis Dec 13, 2019
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Quoting: Eike(*) Sorry for calling people "resources" here, it's for the sake of the argument.

Considering that most companies have a human resources department, you're not alone. :D

Only played a couple of campaign missions so far. Not entirely happy with all the changes they made (like going into white mode for elevation lines), but maybe I just need to get used to them. The only thing that really triggered me was not being able to create a new line directly from the vehicle manager.

Overall it's looking good though. Everything feels more refined. Better customisation of mouse and keys. And so far no performance issues for me, but the campaign doesn't really push the limits.
Eike Dec 13, 2019
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Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: Eike(*) Sorry for calling people "resources" here, it's for the sake of the argument.

Considering that most companies have a human resources department, you're not alone. :D

I actually hate that (even my German employer calls it "Human Resources" instead of the good old "Personalabteilung"), I just couldn't think of another good example for resources where "Unused [resource] is wasted [resource]".
beko Dec 19, 2019
Look what rolled in today (Version 27560 (December 19)):

* Added train editing feature
* Added cargo load ratio feature
* Added Set line - New line feature

Source
Ehvis Dec 19, 2019
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Quoting: beko* Added Set line - New line feature

This was the one that was really annoying me. That was pretty much all I did in the first one.
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